Colder than North Korea

Pretty day, if fatal. Even the winter lovers have to agree that this is nippy beyond reasonable parameters. I had to go drive for half an hour in a car with the heat blowing full-strength, and 45 minutes later my feet are a rumor the rest of my legs are starting to believe. Coldest weather in four years. Wind chills: 40 below in some spots.

Six months from now, it’ll be 130 degrees higher, so relax. Speaking of cold, some news from space:

ALIENS Why did NASA remove the links to these pictures? Look at that thing! It’s a spacecraft from the planet Falconia IV, right?

Take a look at these amazing photos that were leaked out of NASA Johnson Space Center. The quality of the photos is almost HD and the detail we see of the UFO recorded by a NASA satellite orbiting are incredible. The most important question here is not what they are...space stations or ships, but is the species that built them still on board those ships? It looks to me that these photos were taken by someone that works for NASA and had access the famous "airbrush room." That is where they erase all the UFOs or alien evidence out of photos before they are released to the public. These photos are real, I stake my reputation on it."

You got that? A UFO researcher’s reputation is on the line here.

So the pictures were deleted because someone at NASA realized that the ALIENCOVERUP folder had been made public by mistake, sorry, my bad, and all of these pictures were out there for the world to see.

Lovely. Before you get too swoony over the beauty of the magnificent cosmos, remember that it’s just as happy to kill us with rocks, solar eruptions, or kill-shot gamma bursts that fry everything. Seems we got one of those in the eighth century, but not enough to destroy all life. Thanks, universe!

TRAVEL Google’s boss went to Best Korea. His daughter went along. Here’s her blog.

Top Level Take-aways:

Go to North Korea if you can. It is very, very strange.

If it is January, disregard the above. It is very, very cold.

Nothing I'd read or heard beforehand really prepared me for what we saw.

I can't express how cold it was. Maybe 10-15 degrees F in the sunshine, not including wind chill.

Fifteem above? Pshaw. She visited the E-Library, where the most modern technology was put to use:

No one was actually doing anything. A few scrolled or clicked, but the rest just stared. More disturbing: when our group walked in--a noisy bunch, with media in tow--not one of them looked up from their desks. Not a head turn, no eye contact, no reaction to stimuli. They might as well have been figurines.

Of all the stops we made, the e-Potemkin Village was among the more unsettling. We knew nothing about what we were seeing, even as it was in front of us. Were they really students? Did our handlers honestly think we bought it? Did they even care? Photo op and tour completed, maybe they dismantled the whole set and went home.

When one of our group went to peek back into the room, a man abruptly closed the door ahead of him and told him to move along.

An entire state run on the twin concepts of Fear and Theater. But they're warmer than us. Keep that in mind.

This blog covers everything except sports and gardening, unless we find a really good link about using dead professional bowlers for mulch. The author is a StarTribune columnist, has been passing off fiction and hyperbole as insight since 1997, has run his own website since the Jurassic era of AOL, and was online when today’s college sophomores were a year away from being born. So get off his lawn.